Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (ready to read books .txt) 📕

are you? Not going to say what this big secret is…’ But before I can go on, Mimi vomits and buries herself into me again. Her face has grown pale; her head lolls to one side as though she can no longer support it. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get her to a hospital. Give me your car,’ I say. It isn’t a question.

Evie flinches only a little but she doesn’t argue. She delves into her pocket for the key and holds it out to me.

‘Go,’ she says. ‘Before she gets worse.’ She opens the car door and reaches out for Jakob. He smiles at her when he sees her; I notice how he studies her face as she takes his hand. He is trying to please her, trying to cheer her.

‘This lady is going now,’ Evie tells him.

‘Sorry, Jakob. I would have liked to stay and get to know you again,’ I say. ‘But my daughter’s not well – we have to go to the hospital.’

‘Hospital,’ he repeats. He reaches one of his hands out towards Mimi. I bury my head into Mimi’s and so he won’t see my eyes fill with tears.

‘Here, take my coat,’ Evie says. She pulls it from her and hands it over. I wrap Mimi as best I can in the back of the car.

She seems to have grown paler in the time it’s taken to move over to the car.

‘I’m sorry,’ Evie says from behind me.

THEN

‘The thing is,’ Evie said, pushing her sleeves up over her elbows. She was passing Jakob some foam balls that he was posting into his playpen with a concentrated diligence. ‘OSIP is effective. It does work.’

‘You don’t really mean that,’ I said. ‘You do remember what it was like before, don’t you?’

‘But Kit, I did deserve those IPSs, Seb and I both did. What I’ve learnt through the extraction process has made me a much more effective mother.’

‘Are you kidding?’

Evie bristled. ‘Of course I’m not. I’ve never been more serious. That’s another thing, I don’t think I was serious before.’

‘That’s not true – you took everything seriously. Remember how much you studied for the induction and how much you tried with Jakob when his weight gain was slow?’

‘But I should never have used formula before I’d been approved to – there are so many studies that show that if a mother persists with breastfeeding—’

‘Evie,’ I said, ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing you say these things. It’s like you’ve turned into a different person.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Maybe I am a different person,’ she said. She paused. ‘There’s something I have to tell you. It will come as a bit of surprise but I’ve started training to see whether I could be an enforcer.’

‘An enforcer?’ I almost spat out the tea I was taking a sip from.

‘I want to help other people – people like me.’

‘But enforcers don’t help people – they act as though they’re programmed or something. You know that better than most.’

‘I was very emotional when Jakob was extracted.’ she said the last three words under her breath. ‘Roger said—’

‘Roger? Roger Parris? Roger, my ex-boyfriend?’

‘Yes, he’s training us. Small world, huh? I mentioned before, didn’t I, that I ran into him and he’s working for them?’

‘He’s training enforcers now,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Anyway, Roger said I didn’t see it as help at the time, but now I do.’

‘That’s because you got Jakob back,’ I said. ‘You didn’t think that when he was taken.’

‘But I got him back because I deserved to get him back.’

‘Of course you did – but he should never have been taken from you in the first place. You loved him, he was happy, flourishing. It was OSIP who created a problem.’

‘You know you can’t talk like that,’ Evie said sharply. There was a silence between us. ‘Maybe we should talk about something else. Agree to disagree.’

At that point, Jakob pulled himself up to standing on a wooden baby walker full of bricks. He took a few steps before it struck against an armchair, causing Jakob to tumble. I glanced towards Evie, who watched him fall.

‘Oops-a-daisy,’ she said, jumping up and freeing the walker so he could use it again. It was as though I could see the shadow of another Evie, the one from the past who would be on high alert, her anxiety heightening with every move Jakob made. Now Jakob navigated the sitting room for a few turns, Evie following casually in his wake, laughing easily and ready to correct the walker if it became stuck.

‘Do you think you would like children?’ she asked all of a sudden.

‘No, no. Thomas and I are agreed,’ I said. The party line. A quick dismissal with no encouragement to talk any further.

But that wasn’t quite true any more.

I couldn’t put into words how sometimes it now felt that we were living with a ghost. Sometimes, when Thomas sat next to me in the evening, I could see our baby resting on him. It would be curled up on its front, its cheek sunk into the solid warmth of his chest. I could see its face, perfect, closed eyelids, an almost translucent nose, a soft down.

I could make out its outline, the arch of its back that shimmered as it nestled into Thomas, to sleep only deeper still. I knew its face. A trace of Thomas, a trace of me and the part that was just itself, where we had united to make someone new, someone unique.

Then Thomas would reach forwards, for his glass perhaps, and that peculiar wondering about the baby would dissolve away. There was nothing but air – the empty space that only in my mind had been inhabited.

I had barely admitted this to myself, let alone Thomas or anyone else, and somehow I preferred it that way. It was something that was wholly private, a fantasy that I didn’t want to be diminished by reality.

Sometimes, in that space in between waking and